May 1945. American authorities concluded that Höttl was probably
playing a double game and decided that he would only be used as a
witness at the Nuremberg Trials (his most notable contribution was
estimating the number of Jews killed by the Nazis at six million).
Transferred to the Klessheim prison camp in Salzburg, Austria,
Höttl secured his release in December 1947 by convincing CIC of-
ficials of his value as an intelligence asset. Two networks were set
up under his auspices: one, code-named montgomery, was directed
at Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine; the other, mount vernon, dealt
with the Soviet zone in Austria. Serious irregularities began to sur-
face, however—not just evidence of financial chicanery, but mount-
ing proof that Höttl had been engaged by the Soviets as well. At the
same time, Höttl offered his services separately to the French and the
West Germans, notably Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz. Höttl also estab-
lished a publishing house in Linz—the Nibelungen Verlag—which
in 1950 issued his first and quite successful book, Die geheime Front
(The Secret War) under the pseudonym Walter Hagen (the names of
his two sons). Arrested and inconclusively interrogated by the CIC
in March 1953, he was released the following month. While an offer
from Yugoslavia to work undercover in Trieste never went beyond
some initial discussions, a second book appeared in 1955 dealing
with his role in Operation bernhard, and he positioned himself as
an intelligence expert unsullied by his Nazi past and his communist
connections. Höttl’s final autobiographical account—Einsatz für das
Reich (Mission for the Reich)—appeared in 1997. He died in Bad
Aussee, Austria, on 27 July 1999.HUPPENKOTHEN, WALTER (1907–1979). The head of the
counterintelligence section of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
Walter Huppenkothen was born in Haan (North Rhine-Westphalia)
on 31 December 1907, the son of an industrial foreman. In 1933,
after completing his legal studies at Cologne and Düsseldorf, he
joined the Nazi Party and the SS. His brief tenure with the Sicher-
heitsdienst (SD) was followed by his transfer to the Gestapo in
fall 1935. With the outbreak of World War II, Huppenkothen’s
activities shifted to Poland, where he served with one of the Ein-
satzgruppen and directed the Gestapo during the military occupa-
tion of Lublin.
202 • HUPPENKOTHEN, WALTER